The End of Nightwork

Product Information

This book featured in the 2023 version of the influential annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (past years have included Natasha Brown, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney, Rebecca Watson, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, JR Thorp Bonnie Garmus, Gail Honeyman among many others). In one he is killed by a venomous snake and at the same time has a realisation: “I was not meant to die like this.

My book, The End of Nightwork, is about that most pointless and painful of things: the passage of time.From mystics and soothsayers to madmen and mountebanks, prophets people many of my very favourite books and stories. This is what life is like for you and me: we gradually age, very gradually, over a very long period of time.

In 1653 he published The End of Nightwork and the Sundering of the Curtain in Twayn, in which he described the precise location of the battle of Armageddon as taking place not in the Holy Land but in the islands off the coast of Connemara. The Kourists, when you read about them (I’ll leave that for you to do rather than go into detail) set up an environment in which they and Pol’s condition (explained in the blurb) can bounce ideas around. The book takes the form of a memoir that the protagonist eventually gets around to writing to his son. It is hard to pin down what this book is at times, but the core premise of the book, and the de-ageing process, sits alongside some very interesting and weird asides, but was very singular in a fascinating way.He is depressed about the political direction of the world, governments’ inaction on climate change and the way his life has failed to match his hopes for it. Elijah only appears quite briefly, on the dock in Nantucket as Ishmael and Queequeg are about to board the Pequod.